ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the route of inspiration for the pregnant unmarried woman as a sacrificial victim in George Eliot’s figure of Hetty from Adam Bede back to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s efforts to engage with classical ideals in Italian Journey. One of the “beautiful Gorgons,” it is a reproduction of the bronze head of Medusa created by Phidias for the Parthenon in Athens. From Goethe’s account of his Italian travel and personal transformation spread influences that were not so much direct as allusive, but still powerful, inspirations. G. H. Lewes saw Goethe as part of an intellectual heritage with which he was also engaged: a humanistic understanding of science that merged aesthetic concerns engagement with the natural world. The Medusa, for Eliot, as for Goethe, is connected to the idea of a young woman sacrificed by male desire and ambition who still gains power over her oppressors.
